Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-06-29
Source: The Conversation – in French– By Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos, research director, Institute of Research for Development (IRD)
In the three countries of the Alliance of Sahel States (Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso) and in neighboring Nigeria, the armies have long been facing jihadist rebellions — rebellions that they regularly fuel by massacring civilians suspected of disloyalty, or simply by committing bloody “blunders.” Recently, however, a slight improvement seems to be observed in this regard: apparently, the armies are killing fewer civilians than before. It should be clearly understood, however, that the figures available are only estimates and, above all, that this improvement is explained by the fact that populations have often fled the combat zones…
It has long been known that massacres of civilians are counterproductive for counter-insurgency war strategies that aim to isolate rebel elements by winning the minds and hearts of the population.
In the Sahel, one of the reasons for the resilience of jihadist groups lies precisely in the numerous human rights violations committed by defense and security forces. These brutalities have not only driven young people to seek refuge in the arms of insurgents to escape arbitrary arrest, extrajudicial execution, or torture in prison. In practice, they have also legitimized the discourse of jihadists presenting themselves as defenders of the Muslim community against impious and predatory powers.
Multiple abuses
From Burkina Faso to Nigeria via Mali and Niger, the massacres carried out by soldiers, their militia auxiliaries and, in some cases, their Russian partners, are too many to count. A Human Rights Watch report,made public on April 2nd, has thus shown that, between January 2023 and August 2025, the troops of Ouagadougou and Bamako killed three to four times more civilians than the jihadist groups they were supposed to fight: during this period, 1,800 people were killed in total, including 1,200 by government forces.
This is not new: in 2023, the French Senate finally acknowledged that, during the years 2020-2021, at a time when soldiers from Operation Barkhane (2014-2022) were still deployed on the ground, the Malian, Burkinabe, and Nigerien military and militiamenhad eliminated as many civilians as the jihadists.
In Nigeria, databases have also revealed that government forces wereAt the origin of the death of more than 55% of the victims of clashes recorded with Boko Haram between 2007 and 2019.
It is obviously difficult to keep an accurate count of the hostilities. But the general trend is confirmed by eyewitness accounts gathered on site. In Bama, in northeastern Nigeria, a farmerwas complainingfor example abuses by the Boko Haram movement as well as those by the army. “But the soldiers are worse,” he concluded after the death of two of his children shot by soldiers while they had gone to work in the fields. A refugee from Baga Kawa, a small fishing port on the Nigerian side of Lake Chad, on his part estimated that“The greatest threat to the populations is the army, because it is the one that kills us”.
Abuses against civilians take various forms, from extrajudicial execution to rape, including extortion, ill-treatment, or illegal detention. In Nigeria, it is currently the air force that is in operation by bombingmarketsand someentire villages. Officially, the goal is to target Boko Haram camps. Each time, the hierarchy speaks of mistakes which, in this case, kill dozens of farmers who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.
In Burkina Faso, these blunders are rather the result of escorts who shoot on sight anything that moves when they are guarding convoys loaded with supplies to provincial towns besieged by jihadists. On such occasions, the rapid intervention battalions,created at the end of 2022 by Captain Ibrahim Traoréa few months after his rise to power following a military coup, also carried out deadly raids in the countryside, without even warning the regular troops stationed nearby.
The role of militias
Certainly, the rise to power of military juntas and the “militiarization” of the response to the jihadist threat have greatly undermined respect for human rights during wartime. In the region, authorities have indeed sought to compensate for the shortage of their troops by entrusting auxiliaries with carrying out the dirtiest tasks in the fight against terrorism. According to the aforementioned Human Rights Watch report on Burkina Faso, the worst abuses were recorded when the army intervened alongsidemilitiamenkoglweogo, the VDP (Volunteers for the Defense of the Homeland).
Niger could now face the same fate: the junta there hasformalized in March 2026 territorial self-defense organizationscalled to be armed to identify, report, and arrest suspects. In practice, these militias can kill civilians with impunity because they are accountable to military personnel who themselves benefit from state secrecy immunity.
In recent years, however, the government forces of countries like Burkina Faso (since 2025) or Nigeria (since 2020) seem less directly involved in large-scale massacres. Should we see this as a professionalization of military practices? Could it be that Nigerian and Burkinabe officers are more aware of the harmful effects of these killings, which legitimize and strengthen jihadist groups?
Soldiers and jihadists more “friendly”?
The hypothesis that the military have improved their behavior is obviously put forward by those directly involved. It is also supported by some Western aid workers who, in Nigeria, want to continue to believe in the merits of training intended to teach African soldiers respect for human rights. In the case of France, for example, such a perspective aligns well with the desire to forget the failures of Operation Barkhane in the Sahel by repositioning towards the Gulf of Guinea countries and by resuming dialogue with Chad, whose president Mahamat Idriss Déby has officially beenreceived at the Élysée in January 2026.
For tactical rather than humanitarian reasons, the concern to spare human lives could also reflect the evolution of certain jihadist groups, which have had to learn to coexist with the population as they took root in the countryside. In Nigeria, the branch allied with the Islamic State organization, ISWAP (Islamic State West Africa Province), has thus the reputation of beingmore respectful of civiliansthan the other factions of the Boko Haram movement.
In Burkina Faso, theJNIM(Jamāʿat nuṣrat al-islām wal-muslimīn) Iyad ag-Ghali and theMacina ConstitutionAmadou Kouffa’s group has also softened their stance. Since 2021, they have stopped sharing videos of executions of adulterous women. In 2025, Amadou Kouffa’s deputy, Mahmoud Barry, known as “Abou Yehiya,” began broadcasting sermons urging his fighters to avoid abuses and spare civilians. The goal is both to gain the support of the population and to recruit young people by inviting them to participate in protecting their communities against the abuses of Burkinabe forces andrival katibas of the Islamic State in the Sahel.
On the invisibilization of massacres
Several factors, however, invite caution regarding the possibility of a “humanization” of the belligerents in the area. First of all, it seems unlikely that the armies in the region could have suddenly improved their behavior, given their structural weaknesses, the fragility of their chains of command, the recurrence of mutinies, their notorious indiscipline, the rapidity of their recruitment, the reduction in training times, and the long time required for a genuine reformation of security apparatuses.
The hypothesis of a softening of repression strategies also does not correspond to the hardening of the juntas in power in the three countries that make up the Alliance of Sahel States, namely Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger, all of which havewithdrawn from the International Criminal Court.
In reality, abuses are less visible because themedia were locked down by the dictatorships in place. Western and African journalists almost no longer have access to conflict zones, or must be “embedded” with military units,as in Nigeria. The trend is all the more marked because the government forces themselves have lost ground. In Nigeria’s Borno region, for example, the army has retreated inside large barracks, thesupercamps, which leave the countryside open to insurgents. In the north and east of Burkina Faso, soldiers have withdrawn into the cities and have proven unable to protect the VDP active in the countryside, who have begun to desert and are consequently less able to commit atrocities against villagers suspected of jihadist sympathies.
The scorched earth policy, in this respect, largely explains the reduction in massacres. In conflict zones, rural populations have indeed been evacuated.by military forcetowards displaced persons camps, or have left on their own for the cities. In the countryside, there are simply fewer people for the belligerents to kill. But such a situation hardly bodes well for a way out of the crisis.
Marc-Antoine Pérouse de Montclos does not work for, does not advise, does not hold shares in, and does not receive funds from any organization that might benefit from this article, and has declared no other affiliation than his research institution.
–ref. Sahel: why massacres of civilians by official forces are decreasing –https://theconversation.com/sahel-why-massacres-of-civilians-by-official-forces-are-declining-285449